Contributing Writers



Suzanne Adam left her native California for Chile in 1972 to marry her Chilean boyfriend. She explores how this experience has shaped her life in her memoir-in-progress Marrying Santiago. A member of Santiago Writers, her narrative essays have appeared in several publications in North America. Tree-hugger, avid reader, nature writer, talker to stray dogs and cats, gardener, CNN news junkie, walker, bird watcher, lover of storms and laughter, Pilates aficionado and doting granny, she writes about the expatriate experience at www.tarweedspirit.blogspot.com.

Danette Beavers joined Santiago Writers in 2010. She dedicates most of her time to her blog, www.thegoodelephant.com, where she’ll dance you a jig, tell you a story or sing you a song. For money, she edits novels and teaches EFL. She is married with two children.

Sheila Burns is a Canadian journalist who has lived in Chile for twenty years. She worked for CBC-Vancouver, an NGO focused on development in Latin America and has contributed articles to the Guardian Weekly. A recent convert to Santiago Writers, she is delighted to find others who think spending their time conjuring fictional worlds with felicitous phrases is completely normal behavior. 

Tracy Grant arrived in Chile on the arm of her Chilean husband and quickly became immersed in his family’s ski business.  Thirty-five years later, a wealth of family history – letters, albums, loose photos, Victorian period items – invaded their lives.  She is sorting through the family history, finding a narrative memoir and chasing it down.

Ellen Hawkins is a Canadian whose many years of living abroad – and marriage to a Scot – have altered her accent, language and outlook on life. A founder member of Santiago Writers, her short stories have appeared in their three anthologies: Friday’s Fare, In Transit and Perspectives. Djinxed, her memoir of living in Indonesia in the 1970s, was published in 2010.

Larissa Higgins was born in Australia, raised in Papua New Guinea and the United states, and graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Master’s Degree in Architecture.  Her move to Chile marks the third time that she has lived here!  Larissa writes to explore the effects of cultural differences and cultural translocation. She also tends to rant about the architecture that other people design. She loves making people laugh and works hard at it at www.tabubilgirl.com.


Taeko Kushiro is Japanese but has spent the last thirty years in Tanzania, Singapore, Thailand, and Chile. Degrees in English Literature – rusty and dusty. Driftwood Fire, Chile, her anthology of creative memoir, essays, short stories and poems was published in 2012, just in time for her return to her homeland. 

Rebecca Ochoa has been living in Santiago since she moved from the U.S. in 2007.  She wrote her first poem at age five and has been writing and reading fiction since. At the University of Oregon, she studied Spanish, English and Women's and Gender Studies, concentrating on Creative Writing.  In 2006 she participated in the Kidd Tutorial, a year-long Creative Writing Program which inspired her to write consistently and take herself seriously.  It took her several more years to actually do this, but now she is working on two books and a number of short stories.  

Charmaine Pauls was born in South Africa, has lived in France and currently resides in Chile. Permanently hovering between homes, she used her travel experience of different parts of the world as backdrops for her romance novels Between Yesterday & Tomorrow (2011) and Between Fire & Ice (2012). The Winemaker is due for publication in 2013. When she is not writing, the ex-communications and public relations practitioner loves to look at the world from behind the lens of her camera. Follow her and her stories on www.charmainepauls.com.

Mary Judith Ress, ex nun, high school teacher, journalist, editor, missionary, economist and wife is currently an ecofeminist theologian. She finds it easier to convey her passions through writing fiction where her characters wrestle with their shadows. Her novel Blood Flowers, published in 2010, is set in Chile and El Salvador during the tumultuous seventies.

Suzanne Roberts is a teacher and a musician who started writing shortly before immigrating from the United States to Chile three years ago.  She has found writing to be a delightful companion, participating in workshops and leading and online critique group before finding Santiago Writers in 2010. Currently, she is working on a piece of historical fiction and writing articles for the Santiago Times.

Susan Siddeley was born in Yorkshire, England and emigrated to Canada with her geologist husband in 1968. Nowadays, she divides her time between Toronto and Santiago, Chile, where together with Ellen Hawkins, she founded the Santiago Writers.  In 2011 after a series of poetry chapbooks, she published a memoir about living on three continents. Her short stories have placed in competitions, including the 2010 Malton Literary Festival. She shops at Marks & Spencers (Redcar), Winners (Yonge and College) and Falabella (Providencia).  For more about her writing, and a link to her book, check out http://losparronales.blogspot.ca

Tessa Too-Kong was born in Guyana and resides in Chile. She joined Santiago Writers in 2005. She juggles her time as remote editor and translator to write poetry and short stories, play bridge and practise yoga and Tai Chi. Her first collection of poems, Parallel Shores, was published in 2012.

Jennifer Wickham has been a traveling member of Santiago Writers since 2008, and recently published several pieces in the group´s 2011 anthology titled Perspectives. Originally from Portland, Oregon, she studied literature and psychology in Monmouth, San Francisco, and San Diego before adventuring to Chile fifteen years ago.  Jennifer lives and works on the coast near Viña del Mar with her Chilean husband and two young girls.  She is currently working on a collection of short stories and poems.

Pamela Yorston, born and raised in Buenos Aires, has spent most of her life moving among Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. A storyteller since she could talk, she was first published in two separate anthologies in Brazil, and later contributed several stories to 2007s In Transit. She is currently working on a fictionalised biography of her great-uncle, a turn-of-the-century country doctor.



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